The problem lies in that player of this modern game of poker are more knowledgeable than ever before so your edge over a typical player - unless you are a superstar like Phil Ivey - is much less than a couple of years ago. This makes pressing your advantage become more difficult, but also makes it increasingly important to do whenever you feel you have an edge over a particular opponent.
Picture the scene, you are seated on the button, the best seat in the house and a player who we have tagged as a weak player (try to refrain from calling them fish or donkeys!) commits a cardinal sin and open-limps in front of us. His passive play is a sure sign of weakness and we want to take advantage of that and play a pot in position against him. With this in mind, we decide to raise so that the small and big blind fold and hopefully we get to play against a weak opponent and have positional advantage over him. But what sort of hands should we be isolating the weak player with?
First of all you need to factor in the sort of hands our opponent is playing. If he is a fan of Q5 then we are delighted to be raising and isolating with hands such as Q9, QT, QJ, KQ and AQ because when our opponent hits his queen he is often going to make a second best hand and pay us off handsomely. Obviously, playing a hand such as Q4, Q3 and Q2 should be avoided because o the opposite reason; our card advantage becomes too weak.
That is not to say we shouldn't isolate with a wider than normal range of hands against a weak player, far from it. In this example we have the button, so that gives us a licence to isolate with a much wider range of hands because we have the ultimate positional advantage. While in possession of the button it is much easier to control what happens in the hand so we can therefore play looser than normal.
Lastly, we should be honest in our evaluation of a player to determine if we do actually have a skill advantage over them. The wider this gap in skill, the looser - in theory - you can isolate with because they will be making many more mistakes than you once the community cards start to come into view.
Add up all of these factors and it should be easy to determine the hands that you should isolate weak players with.
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